by FDR
* TR’s daughter Alice often joked that the difference between the Oyster Bay Roosevelts and those from Hyde Park was that her family traveled in a borrowed railroad car while the Hyde Park clan owned one. Linda Donn, The Roosevelt Cousins 88 (New York: Knopf, 2001).
* Throughout his life, FDR used “Algonac” as a code word to mean that everything was all right, “superfine, splendid et pas cher.” See FDR to SDR, June 7, 1905, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 21, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
* Seven years later White married Bessie Springs Smith of Smithtown, Long Island. By then McKim, Mead and White had become the leading architectural firm in America, setting the pace in both public and private building, and driven by the manic energy of Stanford White. Warren Delano’s forebodings to the contrary, White became exceedingly wealthy. But on one point Warren may have been correct: White was probably unsuitable as a husband. His philandering was notorious, and in 1906 he was shot and killed by a jealous husband, Harry Thaw, while watching the floor show at the rooftop restaurant at Madison Square Garden—which White had designed. Paul R. Baker, Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White 33–34, 372–373 (New York: Free Press, 1989).
TWO
MY SON FRANKLIN
I have always been a great believer in heredity.
—SARA DELANO ROOSEVELT
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT was born late in the evening of January 30, 1882. Sara was in labor twenty-six hours and narrowly survived an overdose of chloroform administered by a solicitous country doctor. That night, in the diary Sara kept, James wrote, “At quarter to nine my Sallie had a splendid large baby boy. He weighs 10 lbs., without clothes.”1 For the next two months the baby went unnamed as James and Sara delicately struggled for control. Roosevelt tradition dictated the boy be named Isaac. By naming Rosy after himself twenty-eight years earlier, James had disrupted that tradition. He now wished to restore it by naming the baby in honor of his father. Sara, who was expected to defer to her husband’s wishes, declined to do so in naming her son. She detested the name Isaac. Before the child was born she had decided that if it were a boy, he would be named for her father: Warren Delano Roosevelt. The toing and froing continued through February. Eventually James gave way. His commitment to Roosevelt tradition was no match for Sara’s determination.2
Sara’s father was delighted. The baby, he wrote, was “a beautiful little fellow—well and strong and well-behaved—with a good-shaped head of the Delano type.”3 But there was a problem. A brother of Sara’s had recently lost a young son who had been named Warren Delano IV. Out of sympathy, Sara agreed it would be untimely to name her baby Warren as well. “We are disappointed, and so is Papa,” she wrote, “but of course there is nothing to say.”4 As an alternative, Sara proposed to name the baby for her favorite uncle, Franklin Delano, who had married Laura Astor and lived a few miles north at a baronial estate known as Steen Valetje in Barrytown. Her father worried that some might think the name was selected “with an idea of possible advantage” since Uncle Frank and Aunt Laura were childless, but Sara brushed the objection aside.5
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was christened on March 20, 1882, at a small family ceremony in the chapel of Hyde Park’s St. James’ Episcopal Church. Nelly Blodgett, one of Sara’s closest friends since childhood, was godmother. There were two godfathers: Will Forbes, Sara’s brother-in-law (Dora’s husband), and Elliott Roosevelt, the younger brother of Sara’s friend Bamie and TR, and soon to be the father of Eleanor. Had he lived, Elliott, in addition to being Franklin’s godfather, would also have become his father-in-law.
The world appeared remarkably peaceful when FDR was christened. The “Concert of Europe,” in place since the Napoleonic wars, provided unprecedented international stability. Christianity, capitalism, and colonialism cemented the cohesion of the Great Powers. German unity had been achieved by Bismarck without rending the fabric of consensus, and few shed a tear for the demise of the papacy’s temporal authority in Italy. In Britain, Queen Victoria ruled majestically in the fifth decade of her seemingly endless reign. Emperor Franz Josef was well into his fourth decade on the Hapsburg throne; Republican France appeared to have found its footing; and north of the U.S. border a newly autonomous Dominion of Canada greeted the United States as a full-fledged North American partner.
Beneath the veneer of calm, passions stirred uneasily—a dangerous portent of what lay ahead. In 1881 President James Garfield and Czar Alexander II of Russia were both victims of political violence: Garfield slain at the hand of a madman in Washington; Alexander killed by a terrorist bomb on the streets of Saint Petersburg. The rapid pace of industrialization, the dislocation of families from rural to urban settings, massive immigration, unspeakable working conditions, labor unrest, and pestilential slums darkened the horizon.
This was a time of enormous growth in the United States. The population, which stood at 35 million at the close of the Civil War, had jumped to 53 million—a 51 percent increase in little more than fifteen years. The American birthrate, 39.8 per thousand in 1882, was almost twice that of Great Britain and three times that of France. Immigration had soared to 800,000 people annually. In the year of FDR’s birth, more than a quarter of a million potential new citizens arrived from Germany and an almost equal number from Scandinavia and the British Isles.6
America’s gross domestic product (GDP) had doubled since 1865 and was now the largest in the world: one third larger than Britain’s, twice that of France, and three times as great as Germany.7 The production of steel, less than twenty thousand tons in 1867, totaled almost 2 million tons in 1882. Coal production had tripled. On the negative side, more than five hundred miners lost their lives in deep-pit accidents each year.8
Within a decade of FDR’s birth, the electric light, the telephone, and the automobile were invented. The continent would be spanned by not one but six transcontinental railroads. This was the age of Social Darwinism and robber barons: Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington, and William Vanderbilt in transportation; the steel trust of Andrew Carnegie; John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil; and the mother of all trusts, the great sugar trust of Henry Havemeyer. Chester Arthur was in the White House, the Republicans controlled the House, the Democrats the Senate, and civil service reform, a belated reaction to the assassination of President Garfield, was just around the corner.
Few of the worries of American life intruded at Springwood. FDR grew up in a privileged, carefree environment of comfort and security. “In thinking back to my earliest days,” he said many years later, “I am impressed by the peacefulness and regularity of things both in respect to places and people. Up to the age of seven, Hyde Park was the center of the world.”9
Families as wealthy as the Roosevelts usually entrusted newborn babies to the care of experienced nurses and old family retainers. Not Sara. As soon as she recovered from childbirth, she insisted on doing everything herself: “Every mother ought to learn to care for her own baby, whether she can afford to delegate the task to someone or not.” And although a wet nurse was available, Sara nursed Franklin for almost a year.10
Mittie Roosevelt, who had introduced James to Sara two years before, spent a week at Hyde Park in June 1882. To her son Elliott she wrote, “I held your dear little godson and enjoyed him intensely. He is such a fair, sweet, cunning little bright five-months-old darling baby.… Sallie [is] devoted and looks so very lovely with him, like a Murillo Madonna and infant.”11
Sara was determined to raise Franklin as a Delano—which meant to raise him as she had been raised under the benign discipline of her father. When the Roosevelts made their first pilgrimage to the Delano ancestral home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, FDR was placed in the same hooded cradle in which his grandfather had slept seventy-three years earlier. Warren Delano eventually had seventeen grandchildren, yet none of the others was ever permitted such indulgence.12
Because of Franklin’s difficult birth, Sara was advised to avoid a second and possibly fatal pregnancy. The Roosevelts,
like many couples in the nineteenth century faced with a similar problem, adopted abstinence as a remedy, and from time to time that led to marital tension.13 Sara, still young and energetic, found solace arranging and organizing the life of her little son. No moment of Franklin’s day was unscheduled or unsupervised. Awake at seven. Breakfast at eight. Lessons until eleven. Lunch at noon. More lessons until four. Two hours of play followed by supper at six and bed by eight. It was the formula her father had imposed on the large Delano brood, and Sara instinctively adopted it. It was a loving regimen but a regimen nonetheless. A less tractable child might have rebelled, but Franklin never did.14
Initially, FDR was schooled at home by Sara. At six he attended an impromptu kindergarten on a neighboring estate. Then began a series of governesses and tutors at home. FDR was drilled in Latin, French, German, penmanship, arithmetic, and history. Sara organized the study plan, and a tutor either deferred to her wishes or departed. One of the most gifted tutors was a young Swiss woman named Jeanne Rosat-Sandoz, who, in addition to drilling Franklin in modern languages, attempted to instill a sense of social responsibility. Mlle. Sandoz believed in economic reform and the Social Gospel; she did her utmost to arouse in FDR a concern for those less fortunate. Years later Roosevelt wrote her from the White House, “I have often thought that it was you, more than anyone else, who laid the foundation for my education.”15
Learning at home deprived FDR of the rough-and-tumble of public school, but it saved him from inept or mediocre teaching. His mind was continually challenged. While public school children his age were learning their ABCs in English, he was mastering them simultaneously in French and German. At the age of six his German was such that he could write his mother auf Deutsch:
[TRANSLATION]
Dear Mama!
I will show you, that I can already write in German. But I shall try always to improve it, so that you will be really pleased. Now I want to ask you to write me in German script and language.
Your loving son Franklin D.R.16
Sara was determined to keep her son from being spoiled by too much attention yet at the same time wanted to show her affection. “We never subjected the boy to a lot of don’ts,” she wrote. “While certain rules established for his well being had to be rigidly observed, we were never strict merely for the sake of being strict. In fact, we took a secret pride in the fact that Franklin instinctively never seemed to require that kind of handling.”17
James, already in his mid-fifties when FDR was born, was content to leave the disciplining to his wife. Little Franklin was his partner, his inseparable companion with whom he rode, hunted, and sailed. Looking back at her own childhood, Sara noted that “Franklin never knew what it meant to have the kind of respect for his father that is composed of equal parts of awe and fear. The regard in which he held him, amounting to worship, grew out of a companionship that was based on his ability to see things eye to eye, and his father’s never-failing understanding of the little problems that seem so grave to a child.”18
Like many an only child, FDR spent most of his time in the company of adults, and it was assumed he would act like an adult. Sara believed that children “had pretty much the same thoughts as adults” but lacked the vocabulary to express them. To remedy that she read aloud to Franklin daily. Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Little Lord Fauntleroy were favorites. The downside of being captivated by Little Lord Fauntleroy was that Sara kept Franklin in dresses and long curls until he was five. Then he graduated to kilts and full Scottish regalia. Not until he was nearly eight did he wear pants in the form of miniature sailor suits Sara purchased in London. Staying at Algonac one weekend, he proudly wrote his father, “Mama left this morning, and I am to have my bath alone.” He was then almost nine and evidently had never taken a bath by himself before.19
Another consequence of living on a rural estate under the close supervision of his parents was that FDR had few playmates. Occasionally small visitors were invited for the day, but none was permitted to stay overnight. The young, well-bred Whitney sisters were invited several times. Many years later, when both sisters had grown old, their parents died within weeks of each other, subjecting them to a double inheritance tax. The sisters had long since lost touch with their former playmate, but Isabel, the older, a stouthearted Republican, swallowed her pride and wrote to FDR in the White House, asking for an appointment. The president, who relished meeting old acquaintances, agreed to see her and listened patiently to her grievance. Roosevelt said he was terribly sorry, but it was a New York law and even the president could not change it. Isabel rose angrily and shook her cane. “You were always a nasty little boy, and now you are a nasty old man.”20
The birth of a son did not deflect the Roosevelts from their annual journey to Europe. On Easter morning 1885 the family, including three-year-old Franklin, were returning from England on their favorite White Star liner, the Germanic. Suddenly a violent storm arose, plunging the ship into total darkness. As wave after wave broke over the bow, the vessel began to founder. In their cabin on the main deck, the Roosevelts feared the worst.
“We seem to be going down,” said Sara.
“It does look like it,” James replied.
When the water in their cabin became ankle-deep, they prepared to abandon ship. “I never get frightened and I was not then,” Sara remembered. She took her fur coat from its hook and wrapped it around Franklin. “Poor little boy,” she told James. “If he must go down, he is going down warm.” Miraculously, Germanic remained afloat. The water never reached its boilers, the storm subsided, and the ship limped back to Liverpool for repairs.21
Travel was an integral part of FDR’s childhood. In 1887, when he was five, his parents spent the winter in Washington, D.C. James was heavily invested in a syndicate to construct a sea-level canal across Nicaragua linking the Atlantic and Pacific, in direct competition with the French effort of Ferdinand de Lesseps in Panama. The purpose of the trip was to enlist the support of Congress and the Cleveland administration in negotiations with Nicaragua. The Roosevelts rented the fashionable town house of the Belgian minister at 1211 K Street N.W. and entered the Washington scene with gusto. “Every one is charming to us,” wrote Sara. “Even Franklin knows everybody.”22
Several times the Roosevelts visited the Clevelands in the White House. James had contributed generously to Cleveland’s gubernatorial campaign in New York and even more lavishly to his 1884 presidential run. The president pressed James to accept a diplomatic post, preferably as minister to Holland, but James declined. He did, however, secure for Rosy an appointment as first secretary to the American legation in Vienna. Rosy too was a loyal Democrat, had given handsomely to the Cleveland campaign, and could pay most embassy expenses from his wife’s fortune. James objected to Rosy’s frivolous lifestyle in New York and convinced Cleveland that an appointment overseas would be beneficial.
Before leaving Washington in the spring, James and five-year-old Franklin called on the president to say good-bye. James found Cleveland more careworn than ever. At the close of the interview the massive Cleveland, a great walrus of a man, put his hand on FDR’s tiny head: “My little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be president of the United States.”23
Many years later Sara was asked if she had thought her son would ever become president. “Never,” she answered. “The highest ideal I could hold up before our boy [was] to grow to be like his father: straight and honorable, just and kind.”24
In addition to their annual sojourns in Europe, the Roosevelts spent almost every summer on Campobello, a slender, rockbound island in Canadian waters off the coast of Maine. James and Sara were so taken with the invigorating sea air and the congenial social life that in 1883, a year and a half after Franklin was born, they bought four acres and built a summer home. “Sometimes,” Sara wrote, “James sails with some of the gentlemen and then I work or read German or French aloud with several people here who care for these language
s.”25 Franklin learned to sail at Campobello, navigating the rocks and tides and treacherous currents of the Bay of Fundy. And it was at Campobello that he began to dream of Annapolis and a naval career. “I’ve always liked the navy,” he said shortly after becoming assistant secretary of the Navy in 1913. “In fact I only missed by a week going to Annapolis. I would have done so, only my parents objected.”26 It was James, not Sara, who objected. For Sara, FDR’s love of the sea was natural. “The Delanos have always been associated with the sea, and I have always been a great believer in heredity,” she said.27 The Roosevelts, on the other hand, were a landlocked clan, and James wanted Franklin trained to take over the family’s business affairs.
As country gentry had done for generations, FDR learned to ride at an early age. At two he was sitting atop a pet donkey in the Roosevelt paddock; at four he was riding out each morning with his father to oversee the estate; at six he was given his own Welsh pony, Debby, on the understanding he care for her himself. He was also held responsible for the care for his dog: initially a spitz puppy; then a huge St. Bernard named Nardo, followed by an even larger Newfoundland called Monk, and finally a red Irish Setter whose full name was Mr. Marksman. Caring for the pets was designed to instill responsibility, but as Roosevelt remembered, it was a herculean task.28